THE FORMER priest and human rights campaigner Patrick Rice, who has died aged 64, was kidnapped and tortured in South America for allegedly distributing “leftist guerrilla literature” at prayer meetings during Argentina’s “dirty war”.His life was changed by the events of October 11th, 1976, when he left an evening prayer meeting in his parish accompanied by an 18-year-old catechist Fatima Cabrera.
A group of armed men bundled them into a van and took them to a detention centre where they were tortured for several days. Irish diplomats alerted the press, and questions were raised at the United Nations in New York about the whereabouts of the “disappeared” Irishman.
The military authorities transferred Rice to a new holding centre, and Fatima Cabrera arrived at the same prison a few days later. Both showed signs of physical abuse.
His captors told him that he was to receive visitors, and said that if he did not want to wind up in a sack in the River Plate to say he had fallen down stairs.
His visitors, Irish ambassador James Lennon and embassy official Justin Harman, assured him they would spare no effort to secure his release.
In December 1976, as Rice was being released, his captors asked him to write something positive in their records. He wrote: “I might have been treated better.”
As a condition of his release he was expelled from Argentina.
Patrick Rice was born in 1945, the son of William and Aimee Rice, Strawhall, Fermoy, Co Cork. Educated locally by the Christian Brothers, he joined the Divine Word Missionaries, studied at St Patrick’s College, Maynooth, and was ordained in 1970.
He was assigned to Argentina as a chaplain to the Catholic University of Santa Fe and as an assistant professor in the university’s philosophy department.
Unhappy with his pastoral role, he left the order in 1972 to join the Little Brothers (Hermanitos) of Charles de Foucald. He became a worker priest in Santa Fe province, helping to unionise forestry workers and agricultural labourers.
In 1974 he moved to Buenos Aires and got a job as a carpenter on a building site.
Following the military coup in 1976, many members of the Hermanitos were forced to go underground. Gross violation of human rights became the hallmark of the new regime. Mutilated bodies were dumped near Villa Soldati, including those of two Uruguayan members of congress. Almost 30,000 people were “disappeared” before the military dictatorship was forced from power in 1983.
Prior to his abduction, Rice investigated the circumstances in which the Bishop of La Rioja, Enrique Angelelli Patrick, died. He also conducted an investigation into disappearances and helped produce a report Violence against the Argentine Church which received international attention.
But he was critical of the ambivalence within the church in relation to the regime’s abuse of human rights. And he believed that the Irish government should have taken a stronger stand internationally against torture.
Following his expulsion from Argentina he devoted his life to promoting human rights. Working as a chaplain at a hospice in east London, he was a founding chairperson of the Committee for Human Rights in Argentina.
He was based in the US in the late 1970s and in 1979 with senator Chris Dodd he organised a hearing on the “disappeared” in Argentina. He also worked with the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights.
In the early 1980s, and now based in Venezuela, he was one of the founding members of Fedefam (Latin American Federation of Associations of Relatives of Disappeared-Detainees), and served as executive secretary from 1981 to 1987.
He investigated enforced disappearances in many Latin American countries, and lobbied actively at the UN Commission on Human Rights in Geneva.
After the fall of the Argentine military junta in 1983, he returned to Buenos Aires. In Villa Soldati he met Fatima Cabrera, whom he had last seen in prison in December 1976. She had, in the interim, spent two years in jail and a further two years under house arrest.
Back in Venezuela he kept in touch with Fatima by letter. By now laicised, he married her in Caracas in 1985.
They returned to Buenos Aires in 1987 and he became active in the Ecumenical Movement for Human Rights. In 1992 he became the organisation’s national co-ordinator.
In 1999 he renewed his association Fedefam and was nominated as senior adviser to the executive committee. His work took him to Sri Lanka, Benin, Croatia and Kosovo.
In 2002 the Irish Diplomatic Mission at Geneva nominated him as the Western Group’s candidate for membership of the UN Working Group on Enforced and Involuntary Disappearances.
In this capacity he contributed to gaining approval for an international instrument against enforced disappearances, which came into effect in 2005.
Last May he was appointed co-ordinator of the International Coalition against Enforced Disappearances.
In 1982 he accepted the Spanish human rights award on behalf of Fedefam, and in 2008 he was conferred with an honorary doctorate by University College Cork.
His wife Fatima, son Carlos and daughters Amy and Blanca survive him.
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